Mr. CEO, please specify the nature of the exact "pain" that you experienced while making these decisions. We desperately wish to empathize with the plight of the modern tech CEO. Please do tell us more about how much it hurts you to have to hit us every time we butter the wrong side of your morning toast.

No, they didn't.
At no point did anyone in publishing/advertising believe that putting a 3-inch single column ad in the Lifestyle & Arts section F of a newspaper with a circulation of 347,000 meant that the ad was seen by 347,000 different people. The fact that you personally may have never looked at ads (which, if you're being honest, is almost certainly not true unless you were born after 1990ish) doesn't matter. Everyone in publishing/advertising understood that they weren't getting 347,000 "pageviews" - they were making sure that their ad had a high chance of being seen/noticed by the percentage of readers who see/notice ads. And up until 2005-2010, that was still a large percentage.

Back before ~2010, and especially once you go back to 1960-2000, Americans deliberately, voluntarily, looked at advertisements in newspapers and magazines because that was how you found out what stores were out there, what the stores sold, what current prices were. It was common for people to dellberately flip through the inserts for stores like Sears, Montgomery Ward, JCPenney, Dillards, Kmart, WalMart, REI, Circuit City, Best Buy, as well as all the inserts and wrappers for local grocery stores, car dealerships, real estate listings, garage sale listings, movie theatre showtimes, on and on.

Ads were a normal, accepted part of the socioeconomic biome. It sounds wild now, but we used to live in harmony with them. When you didn't care about them you could easily ignore them. When you cared about them - and every adult at some point did care about them, to buy a car, a refrigerator, rent an apartment, find the lowest price on brisket, get the Domino's pizza coupons for this week's big game - you could easily find them and were glad they existed.

The modern seething revulsion toward advertising is a creation of the Internet, where ads escaped ecological equilibrium and evolved into invasive species which consume every possible space alongside the content and, when that space was not enough, the content itself became an ad - "I built this AI agent that lowered my car insurance by $130 month and you can too! Link in bio."

Nor were all ads the same. Which section, where on the page, sizing, layout, full color, section wrappers, extra inserts, etc. all had different costs. When ads weren't invasive - when they just sat there on a page rather than popup, flash, wiggle, trigger effects when your mouse happened to hover over, autoplay sound, autoplay video, drive-by download malware, etc.etc - you saw the ads that might matter to you, organically. If you didn't need to buy a car and didn't find cars interesting, you never opened the Automotive section of the paper, so none of those ads were ever seen by you. But those who were into cars or were in the market for a car, did look at that section and did see those ads. Same for people who were or were not interested in art galleries, the symphony, cultural festivals, cinema.

It's quite ironic that the aggressive targetmaxxing of Google and the other major Internet advertising companies - by insisting on chasing the reader down and holding our eyeballs open and showing us a constant stream of ads based on a phrase we used one time in a discussion board post somewhere - have actually decreased the variety and relevance of the ads we see. Because instead of it being an organic ecosystem where we see the ads we need when we naturally would want to see them, we now desperately wish to avoid seeing any ads, anywhere, at any time, under any circumstances. Even when they might actually be relevant - indeed, the targeted intrusiveness is often what we resent most, nowadays.

I keep seeing people say this. If the tech were in fact getting better at an exponential rate for the past 3-5 years, we would be at the actual Singularity today. We would already have reached the end of human history as the apex mind on this planet.

But semantic nit-picking aside, you still have not shown your work and established why you believe that we know the current growth rate (of whatever mathematical type) will continue indefinitely.

We haven't seen a Singularity before. We haven't created a synthetic mind before. We barely know anything about what our own minds are and how cognition works. Even with a truly exponential growth, we have zero measurement tools that can tell us what that exponent is and whether the Singularity will happen at n=2, or n=2,000, or n=2.21x10^273

True. ...in the same way a subway flasher "drives discovery" of novel content for female passengers.

Like most other modern ills, this is due to profitmaxxing and outsourcing.
The human mind is an extraordinary abstraction engine. But it is not an infinite abstraction engine.

For all the decades before 2005ish I could call the 1-800 help line for a dishwasher, or television, or vacuum cleaner, or whatever, and the phone rang at a building owned and staffed by people who were direct employees of the company who made the product. Sprinkled among the people staffing the help line were a number of actual Technicians who already had experience selling, servicing, or even manufacturing the actual product. No, not everyone on the phone was an expert, and not everyone on the phone was a good communicator, knew how to ask well-sequenced diagnostic questions, etc. But someone in that room was. You might have to get a callback in an hour when that someone got back from lunch. But you could instantly tell, just from the way they talked, when you had That Person -- the one who'd spent 10 years in the factory floor and then 15 years as a call-out site technician, and now was tired of traveling or wanted to stay closer to their kids (or their now aging parents) or had a medical condition so they'd moved to a desk job. "Oh definitely, that 3FHC model has a tendency get itself stuck if it's already finished the pre-rinse cycle and you open it to add another dish you forgot. It's perfectly okay to do that, but the diode that stops the water pump actuator when the open-door sensor is tripped needs about 6 seconds to fully reset, so when well-meaning folks try to throw that extra bowl on the top rack real fast and close the door without interrupting the cycle, THAT is what actually interrupts the cycle. It doesn't lock it up every time, but just keep the door open and hold the CANCEL CYCLE button for 5 seconds. That resets all the relays. Then you can close the door and restart the regular wash cycle and you're all good!"

Nowadays when you do get a human, that person is UNlikely to be an actual user of the product you're calling about. So they either can't go off-script because they have zero product experience, or they won't go off script because they're getting paid by a Helpdesk-as-a-Service company. Their job isn't to represent their company, the manufacturer, and engage with you and solve your problem. Their entire job is to follow the script given to them by their company, the script-readers-as-a-service MBAs who've already done the billable math on every interaction. The call agent will get bad metrics and be fired if they slip up and act as a human and go off that script.

Call-center farms inherently, inevitably, without exception change the business's view of customer service from part of the life cycle of the products, into just another dollar amount on a vendor purchase list. Call-center farms don't exist to deliver customer service. They exist to deliver reliable predictable controlled CS costs so the C-suite class have the flexibility to do all kinds of other financial acrobatics and investment shenanigans with the company assets/liabilities sheet to extract more equity.

I genuinely grieve for people who became adults after 2012. They won't ever even realize what it is they're missing. They won't even have old-man-yelling memories of what it felt like to be part of a human-to-human society where there weren't layers and silos and platforms between all of us. When you and a stranger on the phone could actually enjoy working together to figure out a problem and resolve it because that stranger on the phone had part of their personhood in the product, its problems, and its solutions.

Outsourcing is inescapably incompatible with ownership, responsibility, or care. The pressure gradient makes ethical behavior and expertise too resource-expensive. The buck never stops, here or anywhere else for that matter. The buck doesn't even exist. The buck is a probabilistic photon smeared out in fracked packets across an entire global system. You can't find where the buck came from, where it is now, or where it went. We are all collectively DDOSing ourselves every day now. Success isn't building a better mousetrap. Success is building a better abstraction layer so you perpetually avoid being the one holding the hot potato when the music stops.

I wish this were a mandatory read for every product manager, every business owner, every executive:
https://www.ufried.com/blog/it...

He didn't say "everybody" wins.
He specifically says quite the opposite.
"it’s a bit like taking down the primary bull in a large herd. It’s messy, painful, chaotic, disruptive and brutal, but the end result is a healthier herd."

You can dispute whether that end result is true, but his comment did not make any claim that this kind of activity benefits current individual customers.

Are you going to go around and provide that your expert consultation on this issue at a discount to the thousands of municipal, state, federal, educational, NGO, nonprofit, and other enterprises who are focused on a mission which is inherently not profit-driven and therefore does not amass a corporate war chest of $$$ with stock options and 401k matching and generous WFH/flex scheduling to attract the best and brightest to come work there, because the goal is to at least attempt to make their community/city/country better but they are constrained by 10 million bureaucratic compliance policies which force them to select vendors based on mandated criteria? Or, are you going to provide your expertise to the corporation that will pay you the absolute maximum the market will bear for your expertise?

If the former, then your dogmatism over what other people should have done is rational and acceptable, because you are right now out there voluntarily being underpaid while increasing the humanitarian nature of the world around you.

If the latter, then your dogmatism is just social darwinism repackaged as tough love. No different than the Musks and Ellisons and capitalist aristocrats saying "Let them eat cake". Yes, what you're saying is true, that is what everyone should have done. With what resources? With what personnel? With what support? With what project management?

Beth sums it up quite well on Rick & Morty:

JERRY: Beth, do you still love me?
BETH: Ugh, what kind of question is that?
J: The "yes or no" kind?
B: Jerry, do you want homeless people to have homes?
J: Yes.
B: Are you gonna build them?
J: Mm... No.
B: Then what good was the "yes"!?
J: Wait... is.. loving me the house, or the homeless people?
B: Loving you is work, Jerry; hard work! Like building a homeless shelter -- nobody wants to say no to doing it, but some people put the work in. So, what do you say? Do you see me working here? Does this conversation seem tedious to me?
J: Sort of.
B: Then I obviously sort of love you, don't I? So stop asking, and maybe I'll love you more.

It didn't happen with a Flock camera millions of times.
But overwhelmingly (in the millions, right now, as a daily fact of life in pretty much every metropolitan district court), DAs clear cases via plea deal.

Only a very tiny percentage of indictments or arrests ever go to trial in front of a jury.
Only a very tiny percentage of indictments or arrests ever have their evidence examined in a courtroom.

Instead, DAs use the indictment/arrest/imprisonment as powerful leverage. For most of the accused, it is most rational to take a plea deal - regardless of innocence and even regardless of whether they might win at trial - rather than spend tens of thousands of dollars, deal with lost wages, lost jobs, and all the other things I listed previously, in the 1-3 years it will take for a jury trial.

The government has the benefit of overwhelming physical force, overwhelming bureaucratic force, and infinite deficit-spending funds. To paraphrase the quote about irrational exuberance in finance markets -- the DA can stay doggedly incorrect about your prosecution longer than you can stay solvent.

The statistical fact is, we have no idea - and never will have any idea - how many convicted people would have been found not guilty if they had been able to afford a trial. We do not in fact know what "normal" is with regard to people prosecuted incorrectly or unjustly. The choice architecture and pressure gradients of the system make such measurement impossible; the data is permanently lost the instant the plea deal is signed. And that happens in the millions of times.

"...and then you give them a sizable bank deposit for all of their legal costs, not justice served the towing of their car, the income they were unable to earn while jailed, the job they quite likely got fired from due to missing work, the ruination of their reputation, the destruction of their family, the diseases/injuries that occur while they are in jail, the mental damages, the spoiled food in their fridge, the bills that go unpaid, the overdrawn checking account fees, the credit card APR that jumps to 29% due to a missed payment, and the plea deal they finally agree to - despite being innocent - because the DA uses the full force of government power to leverage all of the above, making it rational to take a plea rather than spend 2+ years fighting it with income you no longer have, right?

...RIGHT???"

AnakinAmidalaMeme.gif

Your simplification of this scenario - which is playing out millions of times every week in the USA across thousands of criminal courts - as a simple mistake that can just be un-done, is one of those perspectives that "seems philosophically interesting but is not interesting pragmatically" because the system does not operate in that philosophically ideal way for anyone.

Are cigarette manufacturing services inciting lung cancer?

One of my gripes with the cigarette industry is these smokable-paper-cylinder models are designed around engagement. They prey on human behavior and the elderly who grew up with smoking, the young who have weak critical thinking skills, and those with mental health issues (like compulsivity and anxiety) are especially vulnerable. I don't believe a Nicotine molecule itself has any intent (it cannot) nor does the company that owns and manufactures the smokable-paper-cylinder model likely have any specific harmful intent to "incite" major disease/death beyond engagement and purchases of cigarettes.

It is legal for you (and everyone else in the USA) to own and fly a helicopter to and from work every day. So why don't you?

Well, you don't because "own" and "fly" are doing heavy lifting -- those words represent a massive cluster of mandatory costs and regulatory approvals, not to mention the zoning and construction realities at your house and at your workplace.

Plus you have all the usual social/network effects where after a certain tipping point, your choices are still technically possible but there is no one supplying the choice on the market. For example, there are no laws mandating automatic transmissions in cars. And yet, if you go shopping for a brand new car and want to drive a manual transmission, you'll find the available choices are rapidly disappearing from the market.

So it will go with human driving.

I came to that exact prediction 10-12 years ago and have been saying it ever since. There will not be widespread common FSD so long as there are still widespread human drivers. Human drivers, human behavior, and human societal realities are the cause of pretty much all the edge cases in the FSD problem space. I believe in a few decades, personal driving will be made illegal or effectively illegal (by being so regulated by onerous cost/liability/equipment mandates that it is out of reach for 99% of the population, just like owning and flying your own private jet to work is legal but completely out of reach for 99.999% of people) as a necessary condition for deploying mass-scale FSD.

If TCP/IP packets had free will, Internet routing would be impossible.

Even if that electronic music turns out to be the recorded transcoded interdimensional screams of the entities who swim in the ocean of Warp space, that the Federation is killing by constantly ripping apart their dimension just so a few admirals can get to Risa faster and without cryosleep?

There's a moving image but someone decided to play midtempo electronic music over the feed. Sad. I was really looking forward to hearing the whoooosh of the ship to compare it to the way Enterprise's nacelles sound when they enter warp drive. So frustrating how every space exploration video I ever watch forgets to turn on the sound. You'd think these world-class engineers could mount a microphone somewhere. Yeesh.

None of those other mail platforms are fully integrated with the OS running on the overwhelming majority of enterprise desktops. The reward for successfully breaching an MS tool is an order of magnitude greater than any of those others.

That's not to defend Microsoft - their products weren't consistently that great to begin with, but they have been rapidly and radically deteriorating over the past 7 years. But there's no useful comparison between Exchange and any of those other mail platforms. There's plenty of room to criticize Microsoft on their own merits (or lack thereof).